A Zilli

Lil Wayne’s “Tha Carter III” went double platinum in eight weeks. It is the biggest hip-hop album of the year, and will likely be one of the year’s biggest pop albums, too, in terms of both sales and cultural footprint. One indication of the album’s momentum and appeal is “A Milli,” currently the number six song on the Billboard Hot 100.

“Tha Carter III” selling a million copies in the first week was one thing; “A Milli” becoming a pop hit is quite another. “A Milli” is not a crossover song sweetened for the radio with borrowed hooks or easy melodies. The beat, by the producer Bangladesh, is both heavy and barely there, built from a sub-bass kick, a thin snare, and synthetic handclaps, none of which play at the same time. The song stops and starts, and never really builds up a head of steam. There is no chorus, and no melodic information beyond a loop that shouldn’t work but does: a vocal sample from a 1990 single by a A Tribe Called Quest that never, ever stops. Though the words sound like “a milli, a milli” repeated over and over, the sampled lyric may originally have been “a biddley-biddley,” a common opening gambit for MCs in Jamaican dancehall during the seventies and eighties. (Imagine a patois version of “Check, 1, 2,” or “Yo, yo.”)

Wayne’s vocal is roughly sixty bars with no apparent organizing principle, more like an improvised freestyle than an intentionally constructed song, which doesn’t weaken it in any way. The video for “A Milli,” which shows Wayne preparing for a video shoot, seems like an acknowledgment of the work ethic and aesthetic embodied in the song: Wayne simply goes and goes, constantly recording songs which he never writes down, and “A Milli” is simply a four-minute excerpt of that experience. It’s plenty.

The beat, without Wayne, has its own broad-based constituency. Like Audio Two’s “Top Billin’” or the Neptunes production for Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” “A Milli” is simple, genuinely odd, and half-empty, ready to be filled with words. Rappers may like the beat so much because there is little to fight; it goes where the rapper takes it. “A Milli” went viral a few months ago, and over forty MCs have done versions so far. I collected some of my favorites on this muxtape, which features both MCs rapping over the beat, as well as producers creating new beats to go under Wayne’s vocal. (In an attempt to tie together a few threads, I chose three remixes by producers who are part of the loose lazer bass affiliation I wrote about earlier this year.)

Wayne’s line about being “tougher than Nigerian hair” always makes me wonder how Nigerians feel about this characterization, and whether or not a Nigerian rapper has issued a response. (What with the Internet and the proliferation of new African rap, it seemed possible.) I know little about Nigerian rap, so I asked Bob Christgau, who knows an enormous amount about African music, for his take. Here is his response, edited down:

My expertise regarding Nigerian rap extends to just two artists, D’banj and 2Face Idibia, who I checked out for the August Consumer Guide. Apart from the Toronto rapper K’naan, who spent the first decade or so of his life in Mogadishu and got his shit together in Toronto, I’ve never found an African rap artist who really sustains, and I’ve looked. D’banj, who I Dudded, and 2Face Idibia, who I decided to skip because the album I found was two-three years old, are pretty typical: nothing special in the flow, lyrics, or especially beats, which I mean in both the “rhythm” and “music” sense of that elastic term. African hip-hop, including the good stuff, tends toward derivative r&b derivatives with spoken vocals—beatmaking in the American sense doesn’t seem to happen there. K’naan, on the other hand, uses African (and not just Somalian) elements in true beats, mostly for flavor or a very well-understood sense of the value of novelty in pop music, including Pygmy water music, which I recommended to beatmakers more than a decade ago.

Sasha Frere-Jones worked at The New Yorker as a staff writer and pop-music critic for ten years, beginning in 2004.